Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782

By Jim Piecuch

This study explores the lives of Southern whites, Blacks, and Native Americans who stood with the British during the American Revolution.

Challenging the traditional view that British efforts in the south were undermined by a lack of local support, Jim Piecuch demonstrates the breadth of loyal assistance provided by these three groups in South Carolina, Georgia, and East and West Florida. Piecuch shows that the Crown’s southern campaign failed due to the revolutionary force’s violent suppression of these Loyalists and Britain’s inability to capitalize on their support.

Covering the period from 1775 to 1782, Piecuch surveys the roles of Loyalists, Indians, and slaves across the southernmost colonies to illustrate the investments each had in allying with the British and the high price they paid during and after the war. Piecuch investigates each group, making new discoveries in the histories of escaped or liberated slaves, of still-powerful Indian tribes, and of the bitter legacies of white loyalism. He then employs an integrated approach that advances our understanding of Britain’s long hold on the South and the hardships experienced by those groups who were in varying degrees abandoned by the Crown in defeat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611171938

Jim Piecuch

Jim Piecuch is an associate professor of history, and has published several works of nonfiction. Tim Cratchit’s Christmas Carol is his first novel.

Book preview

    THREE

PEOPLES

ONE

KING

Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782

JIM PIECUCH

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS

© 2008 James Piecuch

Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2008 Paperback and ebook editions published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013

www.sc.edu/uscpress

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Piecuch, Jim.

Three peoples, one king : loyalists, Indians, and slaves in the revolutionary South, 1775-1782 / Jim Piecuch.

                               p. cm.

               Includes bibliographical references and index.

               ISBN 978-1-57003-737-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Southern States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783. 2. South Carolina—History—Revolution, 1775–1783. 3. Georgia—History—Revolution, 1775–1783. 4. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—British forces. 5. American loyalists—Southern States. 6. Indians of North America—Southern States—History—18th century. 7. Slaves—Southern States—History—18th century. I. Title.

               E230.5.S7P54 2008

               973.3’140975—dc22

                                                                                   2008006203

ISBN 978-1-61117-192-1 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-61117-193-8 (ebook)

To all those courageous Americans—white, red, and black—who gave their lives during the Revolution in the hope of creating a different future for America within the British Empire

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Revolution Comes to the Deep South

2 The British Government and Its Supporters React to the Revolution

3 Whigs Ascendant

4 The British Return

5 The Reconquest of South Carolina

6 Precipice

7 British Collapse

Conclusion

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

following page

New Method of Macarony Making

The Tory's Day of Judgment

Frederick North, Baron North

Lord George Germain

Sir William Howe

Hopothle Mico

William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth

Captain Redhead

Northwest by north view of Charleston

Sir Henry Clinton

Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot

Siege of Charleston

Charleston during the British occupation

Charles, Lord Cornwallis

Battle of King's Mountain

Death of Patrick Ferguson

The Allies

Banastre Tarleton

Battle of Cowpens

Francis, Lord Rawdon

Battle of Eutaw Springs

Reception of the Loyalists

The Savages Let Loose

MAPS

Southern British colonies

Cherokee Nation

Georgia

Parts of Georgia and South Carolina

Plan of the Siege of Savannah

South Carolina and parts adjacent

Plan of the Siege of Ninety Six

PREFACE

Certain terms used in this book require a brief explanation. When referring to those American colonists who supported the British, I have used the term Loyalists throughout the text, forgoing use of the synonym Tories, which had a derogatory connotation in the Revolutionary era. When quoting from sources, however, I left the terms Tory and Tories unaltered. I have used the terms Whigs, rebels, and Americans interchangeably when referring to those colonists who supported the Revolution. To maintain consistency with the documentary sources, I have used the term Indians rather than Native Americans. The terms blacks, slaves, and African Americans are used interchangeably. In those rare instances involving blacks who were not slaves, I have indicated their free status. Charleston, South Carolina, was spelled Charles Town, Charlestown, and Charleston during the 1770s and 1780s; I have left the original spelling intact in quotations but used Charleston uniformly in the text.

In manuscript collections in which each page is numbered, such as the Cornwallis Papers, I have given only the number of the first page of the cited document in the endnotes. The information or quotation from that document may appear on a subsequent page or pages. To reduce the length of the endnotes, I have employed several abbreviations for sources and archives. A list of these abbreviations precedes the notes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The completion of a work of this magnitude requires the assistance of many people. I would like to thank Professor James Axtell of the College of William & Mary for his guidance and support, along with Professors James Whittenburg and Ronald Schechter of William & Mary and Eliga Gould of the University of New Hampshire for their advice.

I am grateful to the David Library of the American Revolution, the Institute of Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, and the William L. Clements Library for providing fellowship support, and to the College of William & Mary for providing several research grants. Many archivists and librarians also provided valuable assistance, and although space does not permit me to list them all, Sam Fore and Henry Fulmer of the South Caroliniana Library, John Dann and the staff of the Clements Library, Kathy Ludwig and the staff of the David Library, Linda Baier of the Harriet C. Irving Library at the University of New Brunswick, and the staffs at the Library of Congress, the Georgia Historical Society, and the Earl Gregg Swem Library at the College of William & Mary merit special thanks.

Anne Yehl also deserves thanks for an outstanding job in assisting me with research.

In conclusion I want to express my gratitude to my wife, Lori, and son, Joey, for their patience and support, and to my Siberian huskies, Shyleea and Max, who knew that a long run in the woods can be the best remedy for writer's block.

Introduction

ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 14, 1782, the weak winter sun revealed dozens of British ships clogging the waters of Charleston harbor in South Carolina, waiting for the shift of the tide that would carry them over the bar and out into the Atlantic. Throngs of people, blacks as well as whites, crowded the decks, the murmurs of thousands of voices drowning out the sounds of water lapping against wooden hulls, of masts and spars creaking in the wind. The passengers discussed with sadness the events that had led them to this point, and the uncertain future that lay ahead.

Hundreds of miles to the west, in towns scattered throughout the wilderness between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, thousands of Native Americans also pondered their past and their future. Like their black and white counterparts aboard the evacuation fleet, they had committed themselves to supporting the royal cause in the American Revolution. That cause was now irretrievably lost. Yet all of those who had fought for it—black, red, and white Americans; British and German soldiers—had made great efforts on behalf of King George III. The proof of their commitment could be found in the thousands of graves that seeded the soil of South Carolina, Georgia, and East and West Florida, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River. It could be found in the ashes of burned Indian towns, in the bloody scars left by whips across the backs of slaves who had fled to the British, in the once-prosperous farms and plantations lying desolate after having been confiscated by the victorious American rebels.

In that gloomy December, white Loyalists, African Americans, and Native Americans all wondered how things had gone so very wrong, how the hopes they had entertained for their future within the British Empire, which had dimmed and flared so many times during the past seven and one-half years, had finally been extinguished. Had they themselves failed to do enough? Did the British government fail them? Or were there other reasons for the distressing outcome of the war? Whatever conclusion they reached, one thing was certain: this was not the fate that anyone among them had envisioned in 1775.

British officials had certainly not expected such an outcome either. From the start of the American Revolution, King George III and his ministers believed that the support of the numerous southern Loyalists, Indians, and slaves would enable the army to restore royal authority in Georgia and South Carolina with relative ease. Yet, despite a promising start when British forces finally launched a campaign in the South at the end of 1778, the effort eventually failed. In the aftermath of defeat, British leaders devoted little effort to an analysis of the reasons for the failure of their southern operations, focusing instead on blaming their political opponents, or avoiding blame themselves, for the lost war.

Historians, however, have since sought to explain why the British failed to regain control of South Carolina and Georgia. Most attribute the British defeat to a fundamental error in planning the southern campaign: officials in London grossly exaggerated the extent of loyalism in the South.¹ Don Higginbotham wrote that the decision to undertake the southern campaign was made because the ministry mistakenly thought great Tory strength lay slumbering in the South.² He blamed the royal governors for disseminating false information in this regard, thus creating the illusion of numerous Loyalists in the South.³ The eminent British historian Sir John Fortescue stated that the British based their military plans for the southern colonies on the presumed support of a section of the inhabitants. Of all the foundations whereon to build the conduct of a campaign this is the loosest, the most treacherous, the fullest of peril and delusion. It was not surprising, Fortescue declared, that the campaign met with the invariable consequence of failure and disaster…. The mere fact that the British Ministry rested its hopes on the co-operation of the American loyalists was sufficient to distract its councils and vitiate its plans.⁴ Piers Mackesy likewise wrote that the real miscalculation made by British officials in their planning was the strength and vitality of the loyalists.⁵ Elsewhere he asserted that British planning was handicapped by advice from biased and out-of-touch loyalists who convinced the king's ministers that large numbers of Loyalists stood ready to assist British troops.⁶ Continuing in the same vein, David K. Wilson insisted that British strategy in the South was based on the erroneous premise that the majority of the population in the southern colonies was loyal to the king and criticized British leaders for clinging to this idea notwithstanding the accumulation of considerable evidence to the contrary.⁷ Those who have written on the southern campaign for a popular audience generally share these opinions.⁸

Only a few historians believe that British officials had been fairly accurate in their appraisal of Loyalist strength in the South. John Shy insisted that the British assessment of the numbers of southern Loyalists was at least partially correct, writing that British estimates of American attitudes were frequently in error, but seldom were they completely mistaken.⁹ John Richard Alden went a step further, describing southern Loyalists as numerous, vigorous and dangerous, and noting that Loyalists comprised a large proportion of the population in both South Carolina and Georgia.¹⁰

Those who concede that British officials were generally correct in believing that Loyalists were relatively numerous in the South nonetheless argue that southern Loyalists failed to come forward and actively assist the British.¹¹ Some of these historians attribute this lack of Loyalist support to flaws in British policy, as well as to the Loyalists’ essentially passive nature. In his study of the Loyalists’ role in British planning, Paul H. Smith found that British officials had no consistent policy regarding the employment of Loyalists in support of the army. The capacity of the Loyalists to affect the outcome of the war, their real ability to thwart the aims of the Revolution, was directly tied to their projected role in British plans to end the rebellion, he wrote. Since they were almost entirely dependent upon British military decisions, their part can be understood only in terms of British efforts to organize them. For this reason it is fruitless to attempt to assess their contribution in terms of their strength, concentration, attitudes, and military capacity, without examining British plans for their mobilization.¹²

Smith described the British attitude toward Loyalists as one of ambivalence, with the ministers eager to use them and unwilling to make the concessions and detailed preparations required to weld them into an efficient force. He concluded that "the Loyalists never occupied a fixed, well-understood place in British strategy. Plans to use them were in the main ad hoc responses to constantly changing conditions."¹³ In addition, Smith stated that British leaders never fully understood the Loyalists, whom he described as conservative, cautious, abhorring violence…. The Loyalist's virtues were military weaknesses. He was generally uncertain of his position, and was disinclined to commit himself boldly. He was more likely to hesitate than to volunteer, to watch on the sidelines than to fight openly.¹⁴ This has become the prevailing view among historians. With regard to South Carolina, Wallace Brown declared that Loyalists there are exceptionally open to the charge of timidity and equivocation.¹⁵ Ann Gorman Condon wrote that American historians have been inclined to dismiss [Loyalists] as weak and unimaginative hangers-on, as lackeys of the Crown.¹⁶

Such criticism of the southern Loyalists, which originated during the Revolution and continues to pervade the secondary literature, has proved to be an obstacle to an accurate assessment of Loyalist contributions to the British effort to regain control of the southern provinces. Denunciations of the Loyalists came from both British and American writers. Lt. Gen. Charles, Earl Cornwallis, commander of the British southern department, described loyal South Carolinians in November 1780 as dastardly and pusillanimous.¹⁷ Cornwallis's complaints earned him the sympathy of a French observer, the marquis de Chastellux, who wrote that it was the British general's sad fate "to conduct, rather than command, a numerous band of traitors and robbers, which English policy decorated with the name of Loyalists. This rabble preceded the troops in plunder, taking special care never to follow them in danger. Their progress was marked by fire, devastation, and outrages of every kind."¹⁸ The views expressed by Cornwallis and Chastellux demonstrate a paradox in opinions of the Loyalists. On one hand, Loyalists are criticized as passive, while on the other, they are assailed as brutal, vengeance-driven purveyors of death and destruction.

The earliest American historians of the Revolution in the South, writing in the heat of anti-British sentiment that persisted well into the nineteenth century, established this portrait of Loyalists as venal, bloodthirsty traitors to the glorious American cause.¹⁹ By the 1850s this had become the standard historical account. In 1851 Joseph Johnson blamed the Loyalists for both the viciousness of the war in South Carolina and the harsh measures the Whigs applied against the Loyalists. They caused the horrors of a civil war, by which the country was desolated; and with it, the vindictive or retaliatory acts, the banishment, sequestration, and the destruction of life and property, on both sides, Johnson asserted.²⁰ Those who joined the loyal militia in the South Carolina backcountry in 1780 were the most profligate and corrupt men in the country, M. A. Moore declared in 1859.²¹

Attacks on the Loyalists also became a staple in fictional works. The nineteenth-century writer William Gilmore Simms published a series of historical novels based on events in Revolutionary South Carolina, many of which first appeared in serial form in magazines and have been frequently reprinted. Simms never treated the Loyalists with either sympathy or admiration, one historian noted in polite understatement.²² In his novel Joscelyn, for example, Simms describes Loyalist leader Thomas Brown as a drunkard, a savage, a brute, in many respects, ferocious and cruel. Simms portrays Moses Kirkland, another prominent Loyalist, as an incompetent coward.²³ Loyalist partisans practice lust, and murder, and spoliation in Simms's The Scout.²⁴ Similar themes pervade the rest of Simms's Revolutionary novels, such as Eutaw.²⁵

The trend of depicting the Revolution in the South as a clear-cut conflict between good and evil, the former personified by the American rebels and the latter by their opponents, continued with the work of Lyman C. Draper, who has been described as a hero-worshiper and patriot and a maker of heroes.²⁶ Draper's account of the Battle of King's Mountain glorified the brutal overmountain men who butchered Patrick Ferguson and his Loyalist detachment.²⁷ Later historians have given these early histories far more weight than they deserve, either accepting them at face value or insufficiently questioning their overall accuracy.

Canadian historian Thomas Raddall identified an important reason why Loyalists have seldom received fair treatment in accounts of the Revolution. He observed that for Americans, the struggle for independence was an epic story to be written in epic fashion, with scant regard for the other side of the argument, indeed with scant regard for the truth where the truth diminished in any way the glory of their achievement. Raddall asserted that as a result, while the rebels’ cause was fundamentally just, historians have ignored the often less-than-heroic means the rebels employed in order to succeed, along with the persecutions, the confiscations and banishment they inflicted upon their fellow-Americans.²⁸

Thus the violent nature of the Revolution in the South has often been overlooked, except when acts of cruelty can be attributed to the British or Loyalists. Participants in the Revolution and later historians have ignored, downplayed, or attempted to justify the brutality with which Americans treated their enemies, for such viciousness contradicted the very ideals for which the rebels fought. As Charles Royster observed, American revolutionaries agreed that the future of American liberty depended first on winning the war and second on how the war was won. Liberty could survive, many Americans believed, only if the people showed themselves to be worthy defenders of it.²⁹ The rebels soon learned, however, that winning the war often required measures that contrasted sharply with the ideals of their cause. Rather than recognize their willingness to sacrifice principle in the name of necessity, most revolutionaries found it easier to blame the British and Loyalists for initiating acts of cruelty, leaving the Americans no choice but to retaliate in kind. Historians too chose this more palatable course.

Higginbotham, in one example of this practice, wrote that brutality and savagery…had no appeal for the Americans in 1775. He described the revolutionaries’ goal as organized resistance carried out with restraint, while noting the absence of British suppression and American vengeance. Noting that the conflict in the South was exceptional for its high level of violence, Higginbotham blamed this on the Loyalists. He described them as for the most part angry, bitter men who wanted a course of harsh retribution against their former oppressors. The bloodthirsty loyalists drove the Americans into open defiance, while influencing Banastre Tarleton, Patrick Ferguson, Lord Rawdon, and other British officers most exposed to tory opinions to embrace harsh, coercive policies.³⁰

Some writers concede that the Whigs were occasionally guilty of acts of violence and cruelty but continue to insist that the British and Loyalists behaved much worse. Cynthia A. Kierner wrote that scholars and contemporaries agree that the Whigs were less ruthless than their opponents…. Tories and British regulars terrorized the backcountry's civilian population, murdering, plundering, taking prisoners, and causing chaos in many communities.³¹ Walter Edgar argued that British occupation policy in the South depended on cruelty for its success: From Charles, Lord Cornwallis, to the humblest Tory militiaman, the occupying forces believed that fear and brutality would cow the populace. Edgar blamed the British for the atrocities committed by both sides, stating that they were initiated by British regulars or their Tory allies. Patriot militia bands responded in kind, and the violence escalated into a fury that laid waste to entire communities.³²

Few historians have challenged this view. Fortescue described the rebel militia's intimidation of loyalists as a form of terrorism that soon degenerated into indiscriminate robbery and violence, leading to Loyalist retaliation and in Carolina, a civil war of unsurpassed ferocity.³³ Martha Condray Searcy was even more emphatic in placing responsibility for the violence in the South on the Whigs. The rebels began the violence, she wrote, referring to the outbreak of the Revolution in Georgia, and added that no evidence indicates that Georgia Loyalists retaliated in kind.³⁴

Two other obstacles to an accurate assessment of the numerical strength of the southern Loyalists, their contribution to the royal cause, and the soundness of British plans based on the expectation of Loyalist support are the difficulty in gauging the Loyalists’ numbers and the fact that the allegiance of many southerners frequently shifted from one side to another. Statistical evidence of Loyalist strength in the South derives from the claims submitted to the British government after the war by Loyalists seeking compensation for their losses. These data indicate that loyalism was more common in South Carolina and Georgia than in any other colony except New York, but claims were filed by only a small fraction of Loyalists, making any evidence derived from the claims incomplete.³⁵

People in the southern colonies supported the British cause for a variety of reasons, some of which had more to do with local conditions than with attitudes toward imperial governance.³⁶ Other colonists were neutral or not firmly committed to either side, so that in addition to the contest between staunch Loyalists and Whigs, the Revolution in the South was a struggle for the allegiance of the rank-and-file of the colonies’ white population.³⁷ In a study of political allegiance in Revolutionary Georgia, Leslie Hall concluded that many people adhered to whichever side was best able to provide them with land or protect their claims to the land they owned.³⁸ Rachel Klein, explaining the rebels’ success in controlling the South Carolina interior, wrote that the whigs more consistently represented the broad class interests of rising backcountry slaveowners.³⁹ While these assertions are undoubtedly true so far as neutral southerners and lukewarm Whigs and Loyalists are concerned, they overlook those whose loyalism arose from a commitment to political principles, and which led them to sacrifice their land and economic prospects rather than forsake their allegiance to Great Britain.

Given the preponderance of opinion, is it possible to come to any other conclusion than the prevailing one that British policy in the South was fundamentally flawed, based on chimerical predictions of Loyalist support provided by biased Loyalists and royal officials? Or that the few southern Loyalists were either passive or brutal, and thus of little use to the British? In fact, a careful study of the documentary evidence leads to very different conclusions. Casting aside the unsubstantiated reminiscences that constituted many of the early histories of the Revolution in the South, and carefully analyzing contemporary accounts from both British and American sources, reveals that British officials were indeed correct in believing that large numbers of Loyalists inhabited Georgia and South Carolina, and that they would contribute greatly to the effort to restore royal authority in those provinces.

The best evidence for this can be found by comparing British assessments of Loyalist strength in the South with those made by their American opponents. When compared, the reports are virtually interchangeable. Biased and out of touch the Loyalist exiles and royal officials may have been; yet Americans in the South held identical opinions in regard to the numbers and military potential of the Loyalists, as well as of the possible dangers that would arise if Indians and slaves assisted the king's forces. American generals Robert Howe, Benjamin Lincoln, and Nathanael Greene and civil officials such as South Carolina governor John Rutledge did not share the Loyalists’ biases, and they were certainly not out of touch: they were on the scene and in close contact with the inhabitants of the southern provinces.

This suggests that British officials based their plans to regain control of the Deep South colonies on accurate information, and the evidence further demonstrates that when British troops arrived in the South, large numbers of Loyalists came forward to assist them. Some Loyalists did hesitate to openly support the British, not from a passive nature but from fear instilled by years of persecution at the hands of the rebels. The unremitting campaign of Whig cruelty, which far surpassed the brutality attributed to the Loyalists, also eventually drove many loyal Americans to abandon their allegiance to Britain in order to escape continued suffering. The British failed to restore royal authority in Georgia and South Carolina, not because Loyalists were too few, too passive, or too cruel, but because the rebels relentlessly murdered, imprisoned, abused, and intimidated those who supported the king's government. Many British officers recognized this situation and sympathized with the Loyalists’ plight. The richest loyalist runs the risk of becoming a beggar if left unprotected by the British army, a Hessian officer noted in 1778.⁴⁰

Like the Loyalists, Indians constituted one of the pillars on which British hopes for the reconquest of the southern provinces rested. Also like the Loyalists, the Indians have been criticized for providing inadequate support to the British and for committing acts of cruelty that drove many white southerners into the rebel camp. As James H. O'Donnell III noted, the general theme that the Indian was an utter villain arose during the Revolution and would continue to distort historical accounts.⁴¹ Peter Marshall believed that a strong case can be made for the view that the horror aroused by Indian participation in military campaigns far exceeded the assistance thus secured by either side.⁴² Edward J. Cashin asserted that the British should have avoided using Indians altogether. The decision to use Indians was a major miscalculation by the British high command, he wrote, adding that the policy insured that land-hungry backcountry settlers, most of whom were Indian haters, would support the rebels.⁴³

Cashin based his opinion on the erroneous assumption that if British officials had not called upon the Indians for support, the latter would have remained idle spectators to the Anglo-American conflict. Indians recognized that they had a great stake in the outcome of the Revolution, and they would have participated regardless of what British ministers in London decided. The logic of nearly two hundred years of abrasive contact with colonizing Europeans compelled the choice most Indians made to support Britain, Gary Nash observed, since it was the colonists who most threatened Indian autonomy, whereas for more than a decade the British government had attempted to halt the influx of settlers onto Indian land.⁴⁴

British officials did make several errors in their plans to use Indians against the rebels. First, the ministers assumed that the Indians would act only when instructed to do so by British Indian agents, overlooking the fact that the Indians were independent allies who preferred to fight the colonists on their own terms, which did not always coincide with British plans. Second, British leaders tended to think of the southern tribes as a single entity, overlooking the divisions between the four southern Indian nations, some of which had been aggravated by Britain's own Indian agents in order to provide security for the colonists by promoting animosity among the Indians. Furthermore, all of the major southern Indian nations, except the Chickasaws, were riven by internal dissension that made unified action by even a single nation difficult to achieve. Third, British officials failed to realize the animosity that existed between the Indians and backcountry whites, regardless of whether the latter were Loyalists or Whigs. This produced the paradox of committed Loyalists alternately fighting the rebels and joining with their white opponents against their erstwhile Indian allies. Despite these flaws in British policy, southern Indians did contribute significantly to the British effort in the South; even when they remained inactive, the Indians constituted a potential threat that rebel leaders could not ignore, and the mere rumor of an Indian attack frequently diverted Whig militia and regular troops that would otherwise have been employed against the British and Loyalists. Responding to the Indian menace in the same manner as they dealt with the Loyalists, the Whigs unleashed a torrent of brutality to suppress their Indian enemies and intimidate them into withdrawing from the conflict.

The role of Britain's third group of supporters in the South, African American slaves, was overlooked for nearly two centuries. Most historians followed the path of David Ramsay, the South Carolina rebel who wrote in his influential history of the Revolution that slaves were so well satisfied with their condition, that several have been known to reject proffered freedom…emancipation does not appear to be the wish of the generality of them.⁴⁵ Ramsay could not have helped personally observing the flight of thousands of slaves to the British; he and those who wrote afterward evidently preferred to write histories that would please themselves and their patriotic readers rather than face the unpleasant fact that for most African Americans, it was the British, not the Whigs, who provided the opportunity to gain liberty. As Nash noted, the American Revolution represents the largest slave uprising in American history. Discovering the power of the revolutionary ideology of protest, slaves found the greatest opportunities for applying it by fleeing to the very forces against which Americans directed their ideological barbs.⁴⁶ Nash added that this uprising was carried on individually rather than collectively for the most part, because circumstances favored individualized struggles for freedom.⁴⁷ The war gave slaves new leverage to challenge both the institution of chattel bondage and the allied structures of white supremacy. Divisions in the planter class between Whigs and Loyalists shattered the white unity on which the slave system depended, and these divisions allowed slaves to seize opportunities to alter their status that arose amid the wartime chaos.⁴⁸

Driven by their desire for freedom, African Americans refused to remain idle during the struggle. Whatever the schemes of patriot and tory leaders during 1775, local slave leaders…were attentive and active participants rather than ignorant and passive objects, Peter H. Wood wrote. Black activists sought to capitalize on the white struggle in their plans for freedom fully as much as white factions tried to implicate half a million blacks in their political designs.⁴⁹ Most slaves, hoping to escape bondage amid the tumult of war, naturally looked to the British. Many slaves had heard of the Somerset case, tried in England in 1772, in which James Somerset, a slave brought to Britain in 1769, sued for his freedom. Although Chief Justice Lord Mansfield was reluctant to issue a decision that would emancipate the fourteen thousand slaves then in England, he eventually ordered Somerset released. Mansfield's ruling effectively abolished slavery in Great Britain.⁵⁰ Some American slaves had concluded that they would be free if they could somehow get to England. The slaves had not forgotten this when the war began. Even if the British army did not offer them outright emancipation, slaves were accustomed to sorting out degrees of exploitation. If their goal was freedom, the British offered the quickest route to it, almost the only route, in fact, in the South.⁵¹

Although British leaders recognized that slaves were likely to assist them in their efforts to suppress the rebellion and discussed various means of employing them, the ministry never settled on a policy for the use of slaves. This is hardly surprising, since royal officials recognized that any tampering with the institution of slavery risked doing more harm than good to the king's cause. The status and wealth of many southern colonists were inextricably linked to slave ownership.⁵² Furthermore, the constant danger of slave revolt filled white southerners with a chilling fear which even the rhythmic tedium of daily life could never entirely smother. Few white inhabitants of Georgia or South Carolina, whatever their political opinions, could contemplate any change in the slave system unaccompanied by violent upheaval. A successful insurrection loomed as total destruction, as the irretrievable loss of all that white men had won in America. It would be a social revolution that was wholly destructive of southern white society.⁵³ The Whigs, in fact, capitalized on rumors that the British government planned to arm slaves; they did it to motivate their supporters and to try to bring Loyalists into the rebel camp. The latent distrust of the slave seems to have been deliberately exploited by Southern patriots as a means of arousing animosity toward the British and of coercing those who were lukewarm or timid about breaking with England, Benjamin Quarles wrote; such propaganda was effective in stilling any inclination to make a warrior of the Negro.⁵⁴

The British government's failure to establish an official policy concerning slaves meant that, as Ira Berlin observed, the British proved to be unreliable liberators…as they feared identification as the slaves’ friend would drive slaveholding Loyalists into the Patriot camp. When forced to deal with large numbers of runaway slaves, British commanders wavered, which made it impossible for fugitives to predict whether they would be greeted as freed people or slaves, treated as allies or spoils of war. Yet, if this inconsistency prevented many slaves from fleeing to the British, southern slaves clearly understood that they could not expect any opportunity for freedom from the Whigs.⁵⁵

The limited use that the British made of slaves antagonized many rebels and alienated some Loyalists, although not all southern whites embraced the institution of slavery. In the backcountry, where loyalism was strongest, white frontiersmen with little sympathy for the nabobs of the tidewater sometimes sheltered such black men and women who had run away from their masters, employing them with no questions asked.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, Sylvia R. Frey went so far as to assert that in 1780 the South Carolina pacification program broke down primarily because of British attempts to use slaves as weapons against their masters.⁵⁷ This is a considerable overstatement, since British officials tried to disrupt the system of slavery as little as possible. Although the British often employed rebel-owned slaves in noncombat roles with the army, many others, whether owned by Whigs or Loyalists, were returned to their plantations. In the end, British reluctance to draw on the support of African Americans to the fullest possible extent hurt the royal cause by depriving the British of a valuable resource. Already outraged at the limited use the British had made of slaves, the Whigs’ animosity could not have been made much worse, and any dissatisfaction arising among white Loyalists from the creation of large units of black troops would have been more than offset by the accession of strength to the British army. Even in a restricted role, African Americans made significant contributions to the British effort to regain the southern provinces, and their potential had not come close to being fully realized.

As was the case with Loyalists and Indians, the rebels responded ruthlessly to the threat from their slaves. Again, historians have tended to overlook this aspect of the Revolution in the South. Wood attributed this to a desire on the part of most Americans to preserve the idea that the Revolution, a noble cause, was fought and won by noble Americans in a noble manner. After all, Wood wrote, the Revolutionary Era remains the most closely guarded treasure in our national mythology. Adding too much realistic detail about the situation of African Americans at the moment when the colonies were declaring their independence might well, in the words of James Baldwin, ‘reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.’⁵⁸

Had British leaders chosen to arm large numbers of slaves, they might have faced much difficulty in coordinating the actions of Indians and blacks because they would have had to overcome the effects of their own previous colonial policies. William S. Willis observed that the Colonial Southeast was the only place where Indians, Whites, and Negroes met in large numbers. Since the colonists constituted a frightened and dominant White minority [that] faced two exploited colored majorities, colonial officials willfully helped create…antagonism between Indians and Negroes in order to preserve themselves and their privileges from the danger of combined Indian-slave opposition.⁵⁹ The methods used to promote animosity between slaves and Indians included laws prohibiting blacks from entering Indian lands and hiring Indians to capture runaway slaves. These policies were partially effective, although J. Leitch Wright noted that the policy failed as often as it succeeded…Africans and Indians intermingled, learned each others’ language, intermarried, and at times made common cause against whites.⁶⁰

Unifying white Loyalists, Indians, and slaves in a common effort to aid the British army in retaking Georgia and South Carolina would certainly have been a difficult, but not impossible, task. The British belief that these three diverse peoples would be the means by which royal authority would be restored in the southern colonies can be likened metaphorically to a rope in which each of the three groups was a strand; once braided together, this rope would be strong enough to bind South Carolina and Georgia to the British Empire. British officials correctly expected considerable Loyalist support; however, they failed to realize the divisions within the Indian nations, as well as the utter lack of harmony among Loyalists, Indians, and slaves, which complicated any attempt to bring them to act in concert. In addition, neither Indians nor slaves were so pliable as to act only when and if the British government demanded their assistance. The Indian nations pursued their own interests as allies rather than as subjects of King George, while African Americans challenged British hesitance to employ them by fleeing in large numbers to the British army and offering their support. Frustrated at their inability to direct the Indians and fearful of the consequences of arming slaves, British officials relied primarily on the Loyalists; made little effort to encourage cooperation between Loyalists, Indians, and slaves; and thus deprived themselves of the full strength that would have accrued to them by fully mobilizing and unifying their diverse supporters. This enabled the rebels to suppress the Loyalists and Indians separately, while only a fraction of the vast potential of southern slaves to support the British was brought to bear against the Whigs. As a result, Britain's southern strategy, although sound in conception, failed because the ministers formed no detailed plan for its execution. Yet, in spite of this impediment, Loyalists, Indians, and slaves contributed far more to the British effort to retake South Carolina and Georgia than has been previously recognized. What is striking about their role in the southern provinces is not that they contributed so little but that, in the face of unremitting, brutal opposition, they contributed so much.

The geographic scope of most histories of the Revolution in the South encompasses Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. This study shifts the regional focus to South Carolina, Georgia, East Florida, and West Florida, which permits a more coherent analysis of the roles of Loyalists, Indians, and slaves. The Floridas were the homeland of three of the Indian nations allied to the British, served as refuges for southern Loyalists and slaves seeking to escape the Whigs, and functioned as bases from which British regulars, Loyalists, and Indians operated against the frontiers of Georgia and South Carolina. While the recapture of North Carolina and Virginia constituted key elements in the British southern strategy, the British made no sustained effort to mobilize their supporters in Virginia, while their efforts to do so in North Carolina were brief except in the vicinity of Wilmington.

This regional study of the American Revolution is undertaken from the perspective of the British and their supporters. As such, it seeks to correct the exaggerated tales of untarnished American valor and the unmitigated perfidy of those who adhered to the royal cause. The result is an often unflattering portrayal of the Whigs, while Loyalist, Indian, and slave supporters of the British appear in a more favorable light than is usual. An objective analysis of the sources permits no other interpretation. As Nash stated, for many of the people of North America the struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the 1770s and 1780s was carried on by fighting with the British and against those American patriots upon whom our patriotic celebrations have always exclusively focused.⁶¹ Those peoples—white, red, and black—who supported King George III do not deserve to be ignored or unjustly criticized by historians solely because they pursued a different dream for America's future.

Courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

ONE

Revolution Comes to the Deep South

BETWEEN 1763 AND 1775 the dispute between Great Britain and several of the North American colonies over the issue of taxation grew increasingly bitter. American Whigs refused to concede that the British Parliament had the authority to tax the provinces, while British officials believed that parliamentary sovereignty was the foundation on which the empire rested and would not consider surrendering that authority to the colonists.

The colonies of the Deep South responded to the imperial crisis in different ways. South Carolina's political leaders, the wealthy planters of the lowcountry, embraced Whig principles and took a prominent role in the colonial resistance to British policy. Although they did not speak for all of the province's inhabitants, they were powerful enough to align the colony with their neighbors to the north in the revolutionary movement. Georgians, kept in check by their skillful and popular royal governor, Sir James Wright, and fearful that opposition to Parliament's authority might cause them to forfeit British protection from their powerful Indian neighbors, hesitated to commit themselves fully to the Whig cause. Finally, pressured by South Carolina's Whigs and incited by its own small but vocal rebel party, Georgia became the last of the thirteen colonies to join the American resistance in 1776. In the provinces of East and West Florida, Whigs were few; most inhabitants showed little interest in the disputes of the 1760s and 1770s, and both provinces remained loyal to Britain when hostilities began in 1775.

SOUTH CAROLINA

South Carolina was one of the wealthiest provinces in North America. Charleston, the fourth-largest town in the American colonies, was the provincial capital as well as a leading commercial center. On the vast plantations in the coastal region known as the lowcountry, enslaved African Americans produced large crops of rice and indigo for export, enriching the aristocratic planters who dominated the economic and political life of the colony. Protective of their power and privileges, the planters actively opposed British policies that appeared to threaten their rights.¹

When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, imposing a tax on newspapers, customs documents, and legal papers, South Carolina planters as well as many Charleston artisans believed that the law encroached on their right to be taxed only by their own provincial assembly, and they prepared to resist any attempt to enforce the act. With the law scheduled to take effect on November 1, protests began in October. Opponents of the stamp tax burned an effigy of the stamp distributor, broke several windows at his house, and eventually forced him to resign. They also conducted a mock funeral for liberty. Yet, compared to their counterparts in many other colonies, South Carolinians’ resistance to the Stamp Act was relatively restrained; they did not engage in the kind of destruction practiced, for example, in Boston. Tensions ended when Parliament responded to the protests by repealing the act in early 1766.²

Parliament's imposition of the Townshend Revenue Acts in 1767 again strained the province's relationship with Britain. The taxes on imported glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea were seen as another attempt to raise money from the colonists without their consent. Charleston's artisans, who were most affected by the acts, expressed immediate dissatisfaction and soon pressured the planters and merchants, who had initially shown little concern about the new taxes, to join them in opposing the law. Representatives of all three groups agreed to halt the importation of British goods until the acts were repealed.³ The opponents of British policy, who styled themselves Whigs, employed harsh methods to enforce the nonimportation agreement. Adopting the motto Sign or Die, the Whigs threatened violence to anyone who showed reluctance to subscribe to the pact.⁴ In most cases, however, the coercion was economic: associators denied nonsubscribers the use of their wharves and refused to purchase their rice, indigo, or other plantation products.⁵ Yet, many prominent merchants refused to cooperate, so that British exports to South Carolina dropped by no more than 50 percent. Merchants who had agreed to nonimportation, seeing their competitors profiting by ignoring the agreement, sometimes resumed the purchase of British goods. Parliament repealed the Townshend duties in April 1770, except for the tax on tea.⁶

While lowcountry Carolinians denounced British policies they considered oppressive, their counterparts in the province's interior or backcountry raised similar complaints about the treatment they received at the hands of the lowcountry planters who governed them. The planters of South Carolina…were unwilling to grant representation to the upcountry, and its House of Commons was an exclusively eastern body.⁷ The Commons House of Assembly ignored the desire of backcountry residents for representation, local courts, and other institutions to establish order and secure their rights. When an outburst of violent crime struck the backcountry in 1767, many of the inhabitants joined together to demand that the provincial government address their grievances. Known as Regulators, these people meted out punishment to criminals while pressuring officials to grant them the right to vote, provide courts and jails, and institute other legal reforms. By 1769, when the movement came to an end, the Regulators had achieved many of their demands. Provincial officials created four judicial districts in the backcountry, each with its own sheriff, court, and jail, and established two parishes whose inhabitants could elect representatives to the assembly. Nevertheless, backcountry representation in the assembly remained disproportionately small until the eve of the Revolution, when the provincial congress, in an effort to increase backcountry support for the Whigs, allocated about one-third of its seats to representatives from the region.⁸

Shortly after Regulator unrest had subsided, the assembly voted in December 1769 to send a contribution of fifteen hundred pounds sterling (nearly two hundred thousand dollars in 2002 value) to the Society of the Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights, an organization devoted to assisting British political radical John Wilkes in his opposition to the government. Wilkes was popular among South Carolina Whigs; Charleston's artisans had earlier formed a John Wilkes Club.⁹ Lt. Gov. William Bull and the council were aghast, not only because they opposed the payment but also because it had been made without their consent. The council therefore refused to permit the assembly to recover the funds from the 1770 tax receipts. To force the council's hand, the assembly refused to pass a tax bill that did not cover the expense of the donation to Wilkes. Bull and the council found this unacceptable, and a deadlock ensued. When Gov. Lord Charles Montagu arrived in September 1771, he too resisted the assembly's efforts to include the Wilkes funds in a tax bill and eventually dissolved the house. Both sides remained intransigent, as the dispute evolved into a debate over the relative powers of the assembly and the council. No annual tax bill was passed in South Carolina after 1769 and no legislation at all after February 1771. For all practical purposes royal government in South Carolina broke down.¹⁰

The breakdown of legal government enabled the Whig committees to take effective control of affairs in Charleston. They were therefore ideally situated to take advantage of the next crisis in the imperial relationship—the passage of the Tea Act in 1773. Parliament's intention had been to assist the financially troubled East India Company by allowing it to sell tea directly to the colonists at a lower cost; the act actually reduced the tax on tea. To the Whigs, however, the act appeared to be a ploy by the British government to deceive them into abandoning their opposition to British taxation by purchasing taxed tea, something they had avoided since the repeal of the Townshend Acts. When a shipment of tea arrived in Charleston on December 1, a crowd gathered to protest. The merchants to whom it was consigned, fearing the wrath of the mob, refused to accept it. Before a confrontation could develop, Lieutenant Governor Bull confiscated the tea for nonpayment of the tax and stored it in town. This action defused the protests in Charleston.¹¹

In Boston opponents of the Tea Act had dumped a large quantity of tea into the harbor in mid-December. Parliament responded to the news by passing the Coercive Acts, which closed the port of Boston and placed Massachusetts under military government. South Carolina's Whigs believed that the Coercive Acts foreshadowed a British attack on the people's liberty throughout the colonies, and they joined their eleven northern neighbors in sending representatives to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.¹²

When the delegates returned, the Whigs called for the election of a provincial congress, as the assembly was still moribund as a result of the Wilkes fund dispute. The congress adopted a nonimportation agreement, chose delegates to attend the Second Continental Congress, and began preparations to resist the British with force. In the spring of 1775 reports of fighting between British troops and Americans at Lexington and Concord and rumors that British officials planned to incite slave revolts and unleash Indian attacks on South Carolina radicalized the Whigs. They used coercion to enforce nonimportation and make people sign the Continental Association declaring their opposition to British policy. The recently arrived royal governor, Lord William Campbell, found the Whigs in control of the militia and himself powerless to assert any authority. Fearing for his safety, he took refuge aboard a British warship in Charleston harbor on September 15, 1775. Royal authority no longer existed in the province.¹³

Because lowcountry planters dominated the assembly and nearly all of them were Whigs, the transition from royal government to Whig control was relatively smooth. This made it virtually impossible for Loyalists to retain a voice in provincial affairs.¹⁴ One of the few who expressed an opinion displeasing to the Whigs quickly felt their wrath. On August 12, 1774, the Reverend Mr. John Bullman, assistant rector at St. Michael's Church, preached a sermon in which he urged the people to keep their proper station, do their duty, and not usurp the authority of others. His advice afforded the Demagogues a handle to work up such resentment in the minds of the People that Bullman was immediately labeled an enemy of liberty. The vestry of St. Michael's forbade him to officiate at future services. Although seventy-four church members later signed a petition requesting that Bullman be reinstated, the vestry refused. The humiliated minister returned to England in the spring of 1775.¹⁵ His fate was a harbinger of what awaited South Carolina's Loyalists when they dared to challenge the Whigs.

The rebels had other concerns besides an occasional critic. They worried about the political attitude of their neighbors in Georgia, who in their opinion did not exhibit sufficient zeal for the revolutionary cause. The Georgians showed little desire to cooperate in nonimportation, leading angry South Carolinians to declare that the province should be amputated from the rest of their brethren, as a rotten part that might spread a dangerous infection.¹⁶

Loyalist clerics and wavering Georgians were minor problems compared to other dangers the Whigs faced. From the beginning of the dispute with Britain, South Carolina's large slave population had complicated the political situation. In 1775 slaves outnumbered the province's white population by 104,000 to 70,000. With nearly two-thirds of whites living in the backcountry and more than 90 percent of slaves in the lowcountry, the fear of slave insurrection was pervasive among lowcountry whites.¹⁷ To keep their laborers subservient, the planters established a system of rigid control that constituted the most rigorous deprivation of freedom to exist in institutionalized form anywhere in the English continental colonies.¹⁸ Thus, much of the restraint that the Whigs demonstrated during the Stamp Act protests was the result of whites’ concern that any tumults might provoke unrest among the slaves. The fear was well founded, as some disorderly negroes, emulating white opponents of the stamp tax, marched through Charleston in January 1766 shouting Liberty. The march threw Charleston residents into an uproar; provincial officials called out the militia and sent emissaries across the colony looking for signs of slave rebellion.¹⁹

As relations with Britain worsened, the actions of a black Methodist preacher named David Margate made clear to whites that the threat from their slaves might be magnified by the conflict. Margate had been trained in England and sent to America by the countess of Huntingdon to convert slaves to Christianity. In late 1774 or early 1775 he preached a sermon in Charleston on the delivery of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, declaring that God will deliver his own People from Slavery. Whites recognized the incendiary nature of this message, and some of Margate's white supporters had to rush him out of town before he was lynched.²⁰ Taken to Georgia, he was promptly sent back to England by other sympathetic whites.²¹

Fear of slave rebellion was also widespread among backcountry settlers. Many backcountry residents hoped to one day become slave owners themselves; while they were hostile toward the lowcountry aristocracy, they were not hostile to slavery.²² One of the Regulators’ complaints had been that whenever they managed to save a little Money…Wherewith to purchase Slaves, robbers learned of it and stole the funds.²³ The number of slaves in the backcountry grew steadily in the years before the Revolution, reaching about six thousand by 1770.²⁴

Rev. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican missionary, recognized the fear of slave revolt in the backcountry as he traveled through the region in the 1760s, and he used it to strengthen his argument for religious tolerance. Woodmason pointed out the threat that arose from "an Internal Enemy, the province's numerous slaves. Over these We ought to keep a very watchful Eye, he advised, lest they surprize us in an Hour when We are not aware, and begin our Friendships towards each other in one Common Death."²⁵ In promoting the establishment of schools in the backcountry, Woodmason tried to tap into this fear to dampen the inhabitants’ desire for slaves. He expressed the hope that education may prove a Means of lessening the Number of Negroes that are now employ'd as family Servants and therefrom by Degrees freeing this Land from an Internal Enemy that may one day be the total Ruin of it.²⁶

Woodmason also found backcountry inhabitants to be extremely hostile to the Indians and likewise appealed to this sentiment to advance his agenda. There is an External Enemy near at Hand, which tho’ not formidable either to our Religion or Liberties, still is to be guarded against, he told a Presbyterian audience in urging them not to discriminate against people of other denominations. "These are our Indian Neighbours. Common Prudence, and our Common Security, requires that We should live like Brethren in Unity, be it only to guard against any Dangers to our Lives and Properties as may arise from that Quarter."²⁷ He also demonstrated the value of education by contrasting white society with that of the Indians, asserting that among the latter, for want of due Instruction, the most Savage Dispositions and detestable Practises contrary to the Principles of Humanity as well as of Religion, are transmitted down from one Wretched Generation of Creatures to another.²⁸ Woodmason may not have actually held such opinions, but he was clearly aware that appeals of this nature would be effective in winning support from the backcountry settlers. The Whigs would employ the same tactic a few years later in an attempt to convince these same people to support the rebellion.

GEORGIA

Georgia, the most recently founded and weakest of the thirteen rebel provinces, was the last to join the revolutionary movement. During the first years of the dispute between Britain and the colonies, Georgia's royal governor James Wright, who had held his office since 1760 and whose political skill and dedication to his province's welfare made him one of the most capable provincial governors in the British Empire, succeeded in checking the more radical elements in Georgia. It was not until the summer of 1775 that the Whigs finally wrested authority from him and dragged the province into revolution.²⁹

The Stamp Act brought the first challenge to Wright's popularity and leadership skills in 1765. Most Georgians opposed the act, believing that it infringed on their liberty. Various protests took place in Savannah, while some opponents of the act organized themselves as Sons of Liberty. Wright thwarted the effort of an extralegal meeting of the assembly to send delegates to the Stamp Act Congress in New York, although when the representatives met officially in December, they dispatched a petition to London demanding the act's repeal. Believing himself bound to enforce the law, Wright closed the port of Savannah until ships could be legally cleared through customs using stamped documents, a clever maneuver that soon led Savannah's merchants to petition for enforcement of the act so that their trade could resume. With the help of the provincial rangers, merchants, and ships’ officers, Wright then intimidated the opposition and put the Stamp Act into effect.³⁰ Despite his success in upholding the law, Wright realized that the Whigs had seriously threatened his authority and expressed the greatest Mortification to see the Reins of Government nearly hoisted out of my Hands, His Majesties authority Insulted, and the Civil power obstructed.³¹

The governor had won the battle over the Stamp Act, but his victory made Whigs more determined to challenge him on other issues. In 1767 the assembly refused to provide supplies for British troops in the province as required by the Quartering Act. The representatives also challenged the status of the Provincial Council, claiming that it could not properly be considered the upper house of the legislature nor act in that capacity. Wright stood firm on both issues and eventually triumphed. In January 1768 the assembly abandoned their challenge to the council; they conceded to Wright on the Quartering Act three months later, although Gen. Thomas Gage withdrew the troops in August. However, the representatives blamed Wright for causing both disputes. Wright replied with a scathing critique of the assembly.³²

The legislators renewed the battle in December 1768, when in spite of Wright's admonitions, members adopted an address to the king protesting the Townshend Acts. In response, Wright immediately dissolved the assembly. Most Georgians, however, paid little heed to either the Townshend Acts or the assembly's opposition to them until September 1769, when protest meetings were held in Savannah, at which participants voted to adopt a nonimportation agreement. Upon learning that the councillor Jonathan Bryan had presided at one of the meetings, Wright suspended him from the council. The governor also worked quietly to convince people not to sign the agreement, and this, along with the lack of any means to enforce nonimportation, resulted in the complete failure of the agreement. Even criticism from South Carolina's Whigs and their threat to suspend trade with Georgia failed to prod Georgians to further action.³³

Wright battled the assembly again when in April 1771 the members chose Noble Wimberly Jones as their Speaker. Because Jones had been a vocal opponent of British policy, Wright refused to accept Jones's election, whereupon the assembly chose Archibald Bulloch instead and then passed a resolution declaring that the governor had violated their privileges. Wright dissolved the assembly, reported the situation to London, and received orders to disapprove whomever the assembly chose to be Speaker at their next session. The governor then left for England, leaving Lt. Gov. James Habersham to deal with the matter. Three times at its next meeting the assembly elected Jones as Speaker. They eventually replaced him with Bulloch at Habersham's insistence, only to provoke another dispute with the lieutenant governor over editing the assembly's records to remove references to Jones's election. Habersham dissolved the assembly, but the dispute began anew when that body reconvened the next year. The quarrel paralyzed the provincial government, so that no taxes were assessed or collected for two years.³⁴

In February 1773 Wright returned to Savannah as Sir James, the king having bestowed a baronetcy upon him for his services as governor. Wright soon regained much of his former popularity when he procured a large land cession from the Creek Indians. The governor toured the new lands, laying out towns, while the provincial government's land office received a deluge of claims from eager settlers. Unfortunately for Wright, the goodwill engendered by the Creek land cession, which had diverted Georgians’ attention from the revolutionary movement, did not last long. When Creeks who did not approve of the cession attacked